Talking Freemium at Buying & Selling eContent

Talking Freemium at Buying & Selling eContent

Tomorrow I head out to Buying & Selling eContent in Scottsdale. It’s a great conference for me because there’s always an excellent mix of content partners, customers and software vendors. This year it will be a little smaller than usual, but there’s still a terrific line-up of attendees. On Monday I am leading a lunchtime discussion about the freemium business model. It’s an often told story, but in March of 2006 Alacra Board member Fred Wilson was looking for a name for his favorite business model.

Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc, then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base. I would like to have a name for this business model. We’ve got words like subscription, ad supported, license, and ASP, that are well understood. Do we have a word for this business model? If so, I don’t know it.

Alacra’s VP of eCommerce at the time Jarid Lukin, thought up "freemium" and that was that. Since the discussion I am leading is outdoors and during lunch, I won’t have any presentation materials. What I’ve done instead,for those attending my session to look at once they are back home, is list some of the key blog posts and materials on the web that delve into the upside and downside of adopting a freemium model.

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Steven Goldstein is Co-founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Alacra. Formerly, Mr. Goldstein was Vice President of Strategic Planning for Knight-Ridder's Business Information Services division. In that role he was responsible for Knight-Ridder's acquisition of Technimetrics and its pre-IPO investment in Netscape Communications. Mr. Goldstein previously held a range of sales and marketing positions at Knight-Ridder's Business Information properties.
Mr. Goldstein recently completed a three year term on the New York Federal Reserve President's Advisory Council on Small Business and Agriculture.
Mr. Goldstein has a BS in English from SUNY Albany and an MBA in Finance from The Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. He resides in New York City.